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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

During 2007 Per Kroll and myself invested a significant amount of time development a framework for lean development governance. This effort resulted in a series of three articles that were published in Rational Edge and a recently published white paper. The articles go into the various practices in detail whereas the paper provides an overview aimed at executives. I also recently did a webcast which is now available online. The URLs are at the bottom of this blog posting.

Development governance isn’t a sexy topic, but it critical to the success of any IT department. I like to compare traditional, command-and-control approaches to governance to herding cats – you do a bunch of busy work which seems like a great idea in theory, but in the end the cats will ignore your efforts and stay in the room. Yet getting cats out of a room is easy to accomplish, as long as you know what motivates cats. Simply wave some fish in front of their noses and you’ll find that you can lead them out of the room with no effort at all. Effective governance for lean development isn’t about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. It is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to try to force them to do so.

This framework is based on the philosophical foundation provided by the 7 principles proposed in the book “Lean Software Development” by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The 7 principles are:1. Eliminate Waste. The three biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of extra features, churn, and crossing organizational boundaries. Crossing organizational boundaries can increase costs by 25% or more because they create buffers which slow down response time and interfere with communication. It is critical that development teams are allowed to organize themselves, and run themselves, in a manner which reflects the work that they’re trying to accomplish. 2. Build Quality In. If you routinely find problems with your verification process then your process must be defective. When it comes to governance, if you regularly find that developers are doing things that you don’t want them to do or are not doing things that they should be then your approach to governance must be at fault. The strategy is not to make governance yet another set of activities that you layer on top of your software process but instead should embed into your process to make it as easy as possible for developers to do the right thing. 3. Create Knowledge. Planning is useful, but learning is essential. 4. Defer Commitment. You do not need to start software development by defining a complete specification, but instead work iteratively. You can support the business effectively through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. This also requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios to capabilities developed in potentially several different applications by different projects. 5. Deliver Fast. It is possible to deliver high-quality systems fast and in a timely manner. By limiting the work of a team to their capacity, by not trying to force them to do more than they are capable but instead ask them to self-organize and thereby determine what they can accomplish, you can establish a reliable and repeatable flow of work. 6. Respect People. Sustainable advantage is gained from engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a human resources strategy which is specific to IT, that you need to focus on enabling teams not on controlling them. 7. Optimize the Whole. If you want to govern your development efforts effectively you must look at the bigger picture, not just individual project teams. You need to understand the high-level business process which the individual systems support, processes which often cross multiple systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so that you can deliver a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well you’re delivering business value, because that is the raison d’etre of your IT department.

Based on our experiences, and guided by the 7 principles, Per Kroll and I identified 18 practices of lean development governance. We've organized these practices into 6 categories:1. The Roles & Responsibilities category: - Promote Self-Organizing Teams. The best people for planning work are the ones who are going to do it. - Align Team Structure With Architecture. The organization of your project team should reflect the desired architectural structure of the system you are building to streamline the activities of the team.

2. The Organization category: - Align HR Policies With IT Values. Hiring, retaining, and promoting technical staff requires different strategies compared to non-technical staff. - Align Stakeholder Policies With IT Values. Your stakeholders may not understand the implications of the decisions that they make, for example that requiring an “accurate” estimate at the beginning of a project can dramatically increase project risk instead of decrease it as intended.

3. The Processes category: - Adapt the Process. Because teams vary in size, distribution, purpose, criticality, need for oversight, and member skillset you must tailor the process to meet a team’s exact needs. - Continuous Improvement. You should strive to identify and act on lessons learned throughout the project, not just at the end. - Embedded Compliance. It is better to build compliance into your day-to-day process, instead of having a separate compliance process that often results in unnecessary overhead. - Iterative Development. An iterative approach to software delivery allows progressive development and disclosure of software components, with a reduction of overall failure risk, and provides an ability to make fine-grained adjustment and correction with minimal lost time for rework. - Risk-Based Milestones. You want to mitigate the risks of your project, in particular business and technical risks, early in the lifecycle. You do this by having throughout your project several milestones that teams work toward.

4. The Measures category: - Simple and Relevant Metrics. You should automate metrics collection as much as possible, minimize the number of metrics collected, and know why you’re collecting them. - Continuous Project Monitoring. Automated metrics gathering enables you to monitor projects and thereby identify potential issues so that you can collaborate closely with the project team to resolve problems early.

5. The Mission & Principles category: - Business-Driven Project Pipeline. You should invest in the projects that are well-aligned to the business direction, return definable value, and match well with the priorities of the enterprise. - Pragmatic Governance Body. Effective governance bodies focus on enabling development teams in a cost-effective and timely manner. They typically have a small core staff with a majority of members being representatives from the governed organizations. - Staged Program Delivery. Programs, which are collections of related projects, should be rolled out in increments over time. Instead of holding back a release to wait for a subproject, each individual subprojects must sign up to predetermined release date. If the subproject misses it skips to the next release, minimizing the impact to the customers of the program. - Scenario-Driven Development. By taking a scenario-driven approach, you can understand how people will actually use your system, thereby enabling you to build something that meets their actual needs. The whole cannot be defined without understanding the parts, and the parts cannot be defined in detail without understanding the whole.

6. The Polices & Standards category: - Valued Corporate Assets. Guidance, such as programming guidelines or database design conventions, and reusable assets such as frameworks and components, will be adopted if they are perceived to add value to developers. You want to make it as easy as possible for developers to comply to, and more importantly take advantage of, your corporate IT infrastructure. - Flexible Architectures. Architectures that are service-oriented, component-based, or object-oriented and implement common architectural and design patterns lend themselves to greater levels of consistency, reuse, enhanceability, and adaptability. - Integrated Lifecycle Environment. Automate as much of the “drudge work”, such as metrics gathering and system build, as possible. Your tools and processes should fit together effectively throughout the lifecycle.

The URLs for the 3 articles:Principles and Organizations: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jun07/kroll/Processes and Measures: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jul07/kroll_ambler/Roles and Policies: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/aug07/ambler_kroll/

The URL for the white paper:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg

The URL for the webcast:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=112907C[Read More]

In Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom
Poppendieck show how the seven principles of lean manufacturing can be applied
to optimize the whole IT value stream. These principles are:

Eliminate waste. Lean thinking advocates regard any activity
that does not directly add value to the finished product as waste. The three
biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of unrequired
features, project churn and crossing organizational boundaries (particularly
between stakeholders and development teams). To reduce waste it is critical
that development teams be allowed to self organize and operate in a manner that
reflects the work they’re trying to accomplish. Walker Royce argues in “Improving Software Economics” that the primary benefit of modern iterative/agile
techniques is the reduction of scrap and rework late in the lifecycle.

Build in quality.Your process should not allow defects to
occur in the first place, but when this isn’t possible you should work in such
a way that you do a bit of work, validate it, fix any issues that you find, and
then iterate.Inspecting after the fact,
and queuing up defects to be fixed at some time in the future, isn’t as
effective.Agile practices which build
quality into your process include test driven development (TDD) and non-solo
development practices such as pair programming and modeling with others.

Create knowledge.Planning is useful, but learning is essential.
You want to promote strategies, such as iterative development, that help teams
discover what stakeholders really want and act on that knowledge. It’s also
important for a team to regularly reflect on what they’re doing and then act to
improve their approach.

Defer commitment.It’s not necessary to start software
development by defining a complete specification, and in fact that appears to
be a questionable strategy at best. You can support the business effectively
through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling
irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. Frequently, deferring
commitment requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios
to capabilities developed in multiple applications by multiple projects.

Deliver quickly.It is possible to deliver high-quality
systems quickly. By limiting the work of a team to its capacity, which is
reflected by the team’s velocity (this is the number of “points” of
functionality which a team delivers each iteration), you can establish a
reliable and repeatable flow of work. An effective organization doesn’t demand
teams do more than they are capable of, but instead asks them to self-organize
and determine what they can accomplish. Constraining these teams to delivering potentially
shippable solutions on a regular basis motivates them to stay focused on
continuously adding value.

Respect people.
The Poppendiecks also observe that sustainable advantage is gained from
engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a lean governance
strategy that focuses on motivating and enabling IT teams—not on controlling
them.

Optimize the whole.If you want to be effective at a solution you
must look at the bigger picture. You need to understand the high-level business
processes that individual projects support—processes that often cross multiple
systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so you can deliver
a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well
you’re delivering business value, because that is the sole reason for your IT
department.

Lean thinking is important for scaling agile in several ways:

Lean provides an explanation for why many of the agile
practices work.For example, Agile
Modeling’s practices of light weight, initial requirements envisioning followed
by iteration modeling and just-in-time (JIT) model storming work because they
reflect deferment of commitment regarding what needs to be built until it’s
actually needed, and the practices help eliminate waste because you’re only modeling
what needs to be built.

Lean offers insight into strategies for improving your
software process.For example, by
understanding the source of waste in IT you can begin to identify it and then
eliminate it.

It provides techniques for identifying waste. Value stream mapping, a technique common within the lean
community whereby you model a process and then identify how much time is spent
on value-added work versus wait time, helps calculate overall time efficiency
of what you’re doing.Value stream maps are
a straightforward way to illuminate your IT processes, providing insight into
where significant problems exist. I’ve
created value stream maps with several customers around the world where we
analyzed their existing processes which some of their more traditional staff
believed worked well only to discover they had efficiency ratings of
20-30%.You can’t fix problems which you
are blind to.

I'm happy to announce that a revised version of the Lean Development Governance white paper which I co-wrote with Per Kroll is now available. This version of the paper reflects our learnings over the past few years helping organizations to improve their governance strategies.